Tuesday, 25 June 2013

America’s Nuclear Nightmare

The U.S. has
31 reactors just like Japan’s — but regulators are ignoring the risks and
boosting industry profits

The Davis-Besse
nuclear generating station in Ohio, where a football-size hole overlooked by
NRC inspectors nearly caused a catastrophe in 2002

Entergy Nuclear via the NRC

Five days after a massive
earthquake and tsunami struck Japan, triggering the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl,
America's leading nuclear regulator came before Congress bearing good news: Don't worry, it can't happen here. In
the aftermath of the Japanese catastrophe, officials in Germany moved swiftly
to shut down old plants for inspection, and China put licensing of new plants
on hold.

But Gregory Jaczko, the
chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, reassured lawmakers that nothing
at the Fukushima Daiichi reactors warranted any immediate changes at U.S.
nuclear plants. Indeed, 10 days after the earthquake in Japan, the NRC extended
the license of the 40-year-old Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor — a virtual twin
of Fukushima — for another two decades. The license renewal was granted even
though the reactor's cooling tower had literally fallen down, and the plant had
repeatedly leaked radioactive fluid.

Perhaps Jaczko was simply
trying to prevent a full-scale panic about the dangers of U.S. nuclear plants.
After all, there are now 104 reactors scattered across the country, generating
20 percent of America's power. All of them were designed in the 1960s and '70s,
and are nearing the end of their planned life expectancy. But there was one
problem with Jaczko's testimony, according to Dave Lochbaum, a senior adviser
at the Union of Concerned Scientists: Key elements of what the NRC chief told
Congress were "a baldfaced lie."

Lochbaum, a nuclear
engineer, says that Jaczko knows full well that what the NRC calls
"defense in depth" at U.S. reactors has been seriously compromised
over the years. In some places, highly radioactive spent fuel is stockpiled in
what amounts to swimming pools located beside reactors. In other places,
changes in the cooling systems at reactors have made them more vulnerable to a
core meltdown if something goes wrong. A few weeks before Fukushima, Lochbaum
authored a widely circulated report that underscored the NRC's haphazard
performance, describing 14 serious "near-miss" events at nuclear
plants last year alone. At the Indian Point reactor just north of New York
City, federal inspectors discovered a water-containment system that had been
leaking for 16 years.

As head of the NRC,
Jaczko is the top cop on the nuclear beat, the guy charged with keeping the
nation's fleet of aging nukes running safely. A balding, 40-year-old Democrat
with big ears and the air of a brilliant high school physics teacher, Jaczko
oversees a 4,000-person agency with a budget of $1 billion. But the NRC has
long served as little more than a lap dog to the nuclear industry, unwilling to
crack down on unsafe reactors. "The agency is a wholly owned subsidiary of
the nuclear power industry," says Victor Gilinsky, who served on the
commission during the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979. Even President Obama
denounced the NRC during the 2008 campaign, calling it a "moribund agency
that needs to be revamped and has become captive of the industries that it
regulates."

In the years ahead,
nuclear experts warn, the consequences of the agency's inaction could be dire.
"The NRC has consistently put industry profits above public safety,"
says Arnie Gundersen, a former nuclear executive turned whistle-blower.
"Consequently, we have a dozen Fukushimas waiting to happen in
America."

The meltdown in Japan
couldn't have happened at a worse time for the industry. In recent years,
nuclear power has been hyped as the only energy source that could replace coal
quickly enough to slow the pace of global warming. Some 60 new nukes are
currently in the works worldwide, prompting the industry to boast of a
"nuclear renaissance." In his 2012 budget, President Obama included
$54 billion in federal loan guarantees for new reactors — far more than the $18
billion available for renewable energy.

Without such taxpayer
support, no new reactors would ever be built. Since the Manhattan Project was
created to develop the atomic bomb back in the 1940s, the dream of a nuclear
future has been fueled almost entirely by Big Government.

America's current fleet
of reactors exists only because Congress passed the Price-Anderson Act in 1957,
limiting the liability of nuclear plant operators in case of disaster. And even
with taxpayers assuming most of the risk, Wall Street still won't finance
nuclear reactors without direct federal assistance, in part because
construction costs are so high (up to $20 billion per plant) and in part
because nukes are the only energy investment that can be rendered worthless in
a matter of hours. "In a free market, where real risks and costs are
accounted for, nuclear power doesn't exist," says Amory Lovins, a leading
energy expert at the Rocky Mountain Institute. Nuclear plants "are a
creation of government policy and intervention."

They are also a creation
of lobbying and campaign contributions. Over the past decade, the nuclear
industry has contributed more than $4.6 million to members of Congress — and
last year alone, it spent $1.7 million on federal lobbying. Given the generous
flow of nuclear money, the NRC is essentially rigged to operate in the
industry's favor. The agency has plenty of skilled engineers and scientists at
the staff level, but the five commissioners who oversee it often have close
ties to the industry they are supposed to regulate. "They are vetted by
the industry," says Robert Alvarez, a former senior policy adviser at the
Energy Department. "It's the typical revolving-door story — many are
coming in or out of jobs with the nuclear power industry. You don't get a lot
of skeptics appointed to this job."

Jeffrey Merrifield, a
former NRC commissioner who left the agency in 2007, is a case in point. When
Merrifield was ready to exit public service, he simply called up the CEO of
Exelon, the country's largest nuclear operator, and asked him for a job
recommendation. Given his friends in high places, he wound up taking a top job
at the Shaw Group, a construction firm that builds nuclear reactors — and he's
done his best to return the favor. During the Fukushima disaster, Merrifield
appeared on Fox News, as well as in videos for the Nuclear Energy Institute,
the industry's lobbying group. In one video — titled "Former NRC
Commissioner Confident That Building of New U.S. Nuclear Plants Should
Continue" — Merrifield reassures viewers that the meltdown in Japan is no
big deal. "We should continue to move forward with building those new plants,"
he says, "because it's the right thing for our nation and it's the right
thing for our future."

Such cozy relationships
between regulators and the industry are nothing new. The NRC and the utilities
it oversees have engaged in an unholy alliance since 1974, when the agency rose
from the ashes of the old Atomic Energy Commission, whose mandate was to
promote nuclear power. "For political reasons, the U.S. wanted to show
something good could come out of splitting the atom," says Robert Duffy, a
political scientist at Colorado State University who has written widely about
the history of nuclear power. "There was great pressure on the industry to
get nuclear plants built quickly." With no effective oversight by the
government, the industry repeatedly cut corners on the design and construction
of reactors. At the Diablo Canyon plant in California, engineers actually
installed vital cooling pipes backward, only to have to tear them out and
reinstall them.

But even the lax
oversight provided by the NRC was more than the industry could bear. In 1996,
in one of the most aggressive enforcement moves in the agency's history, the
NRC launched an investigation into design flaws at a host of reactors and
handed out significant fines. When the industry complained to Sen. Pete
Domenici of New Mexico, a powerful nuclear ally, he confronted the head of the
NRC in his office and threatened to cut its funding by a third unless the
agency backed off. "So the NRC folded their tent and went away," says
Lochbaum. "And they've been away pretty much ever since."

The Japanese disaster
should have been a wake-up call for boosters of nuclear power. America has 31
aging reactors just like Fukushima, and it wouldn't take an earthquake or
tsunami to push many of them to the brink of meltdown. A natural disaster may
have triggered the crisis in Japan, but the real problem was that the plant
lost power and was unable to keep its cooling systems running — a condition
known as "station blackout." At U.S. reactors, power failures have
been caused by culprits as mundane as squirrels playing on power lines.

In the event of a
blackout, operators have only a few hours to restore power before a meltdown
begins. All nukes are equipped with backup diesel generators, as well as batteries.
But at Fukushima, the diesel generators were swamped by floodwaters, and the
batteries lasted a mere eight hours — not nearly long enough to get power
restored and avert catastrophe. NRC standards do virtually nothing to prevent
such a crisis here at home. Only 11 of America's nuclear reactors have
batteries designed to supply power for up to eight hours, while the other 93
have batteries that last half that long.

And that's just the
beginning of the danger. Aging reactors are a gold mine for the power companies
that own them. Nuclear plants are expensive to build but cheap to operate,
meaning the longer they run, the more profitable they become. The NRC has done
its part to boost profitability by allowing companies to "uprate" old
nukes — modifying them to run harder — without requiring additional safety
improvements. Vermont Yankee, for example, was permitted to boost its output by
20 percent, eroding the reactor's ability to cool itself in the event of an
emergency. The NRC's own advisory committee on reactor safety was vehemently
opposed to allowing such modifications, but the agency ultimately allowed the
industry to trade safety for profit. "The NRC put millions of Americans at
elevated risk," says Lochbaum.

Indeed, the NRC's
"safety-last" attitude recalls the industry-friendly approach to
regulation that resulted in the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico last year.
Nuclear reactors were built to last only 40 years, but the NRC has repeatedly
greenlighted industry requests to keep the aging nukes running for another two
decades: Of the 63 applications the NRC has received for license extensions, it
has approved all 63. In some cases, according to the agency's own Office of the
Inspector General, NRC inspectors failed to verify the authenticity of safety
information submitted by the industry, opting to simply cut and paste sections
of the applications into their own safety reviews. That's particularly
frightening given that some of America's most troubled reactors — including
Davis-Besse in Ohio, where a football-size hole overlooked by NRC inspectors
nearly caused a catastrophe in 2002 — are now pushing for extensions. "If
history is any judge, the NRC is likely to grant them," says Gundersen,
the former nuclear executive.

Even after a reactor is
found to be at higher risk because of new information about earthquake zones —
as is the case at Indian Point, located only 38 miles from New York City — the
NRC has done little to bolster safety requirements. The agency's current risk
estimate of potential core damage at the Pilgrim reactor in Plymouth,
Massachusetts, is eight times higher than its earlier 1989 estimate — yet it
has done little to require the plant to prepare for an earthquake, beyond
adding a few more fire hoses and other emergency gear. The Diablo Canyon plant
in California, which sits near one of the most active seismic zones in the
world, is supposedly engineered to withstand a 7.5 earthquake. There's only one
problem: Two nearby faults are capable of producing quakes of 7.7 or higher.
Should it be shut down? "That's the kind of big question the NRC should be
capable of answering," says Gilinsky, the former NRC commissioner.
"Unfortunately, they are not."

The biggest safety issue
the NRC faces with old nukes is what to do about the nuclear waste. At
Fukushima, the largest release of radioactivity apparently came from the
concrete pools where spent fuel rods, clad with a special alloy, are placed to
cool down after they are used in the reactor. These spent rods are extremely
hot — up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit — and need a constant circulation of water
to keep them from burning up. But in America, most plants have no way of
keeping the water circulating in the event of a power failure. Nor are the
pools themselves typically housed in secure bunkers, because the NRC long considered
it virtually impossible for the special alloy to catch fire. Fukushima proved
them wrong. The earthquake damaged the systems that cooled the spent rods,
allowing the water to drain out. The rods then heated up and the cladding
caught fire, releasing cesium-137 and other radioactive particles. The rods
were eventually cooled with seawater fired from water cannons and pumped in by
firetrucks, but not before a significant amount of radiation had been released.

In theory, pools in the
U.S. were only supposed to hold spent fuel rods for a short time, until they
could be moved to a permanent disposal site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. But
the site has remained unfeasible despite two decades and $7 billion in
research, prompting President Obama to finally pull the plug on it last year.
That means tens of thousands of tons of irradiated fuel continue to sit in
spent fuel pools at reactors across the country — America's largest repository
of radioactive material. A release of just one-tenth of the radioactive material
at the Vermont Yankee reactor could kill thousands and render much of New
England uninhabitable for centuries. "Yet the NRC has ignored the risk for
decades," says Alvarez, the former Energy Department adviser.

According to a 2003
study, it would cost as much as $7 billion to move the spent fuel out of the
pools and into more secure containers known as dry-cask storage. So why hasn't
the NRC required such a precaution? "Power companies don't want to pay for
it," says Alvarez. "They would rather let the public take the
risk." Gilinsky offers another explanation. "After insisting for
years that spent fuel pools were not a problem," he says, "the NRC
doesn't want to admit what everyone knows after Fukushima: They were
wrong."

As chairman of the NRC,
Gregory Jaczko was supposed to reform the agency. He formerly served as science
adviser to Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, and won his seat on the commission in
2005 over protests from the industry. Under his leadership, however, the NRC
has displayed an alarming lack of urgency in the wake of Fukushima. The agency
says it is currently taking a quick look for immediate problems at U.S.
reactors, and promises to follow up with a more in-depth review later. But it's
an indication of how little respect the agency commands that no one expects
much to change. Indeed, ever since the terrorist attacks in 2001, the NRC has
become increasingly secretive. "The agency has used national security as
an excuse to withhold information," says Diane Curran, an attorney who
specializes in nuclear safety.

Some critics argue that
it's time for an outside agency, such as the National Academy of Sciences, to
take an independent look at the safety and security of America's aging nukes. A
better idea might be to simply repeal the Price-Anderson Act and force the
nuclear industry to take responsibility for the risks of running these old
plants, rather than laying it all off on taxpayers. The meltdown in Japan could
cost Tokyo Electric some $130 billion — roughly three times what the Deepwater
Horizon spill cost BP. If nuke owners had to put their own money where their
atoms are, the crumbling old reactors would get cleaned up or shut down in a
heartbeat.

Instead, by allowing the
industry to cut safety margins in exchange for profits, the NRC is actually
putting the "nuclear renaissance" itself at risk. "It has not
been protesters who have brought down the nuclear industry," said Rep. Ed
Markey of Massachusetts. "It has been Wall Street." Wind and natural
gas are already cheaper than nukes, and the price of solar is falling fast. And
with each new Fukushima, the cost of nukes — as well as the risks — will
continue to rise.

"The question is not
whether we will get an earthquake or a tsunami," says Lochbaum. "The
question is whether we are fully prepared for unexpected events, and whether we
are doing everything we can to protect the public. I don't think we are. If and
when there is a nuclear disaster, I would hate to be the one who has to stand
up in front of the American people and say, 'We knew about these problems, but
did nothing about them.'"

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